We're looking for someone to be a Senior Front-end Engineer at SkillZ. In this role, you’ll be responsible for:

• Building the product: You'll be working closely with the Product and Engineering teams to plan, architect, and implement our core product. You'll take part in the construction of the roadmap, with the rest of the team. As an early engineer at the intersection with Product and Design, you’ll have a prominent voice in all product-related decisions. We’ll iterate as a team on the product experience, with current users to get it just right, while also ensuring we’re maintaining a clean codebase so we can move fast.
• Tackling A+ design and technical problems: We expect you to focus on the most important design and technical questions and solve them, with a focus on incremental and daily contributions to all parts of our product code base. You will work with our Product and Design teams to understand customer pain points, come up with solutions, and then prototype, iterate, and launch ideas to production, owning technically challenging demanding cross-functional projects.
• Owning what you build: As you architect, test, and refine the SkillZ platform, you will ensure that our services are polished and deliver a delightful experience. You will collaborate with Product and the rest of the Engineering team on building reusable components for our component library and more generally being the voice for front-end best practices to impact the productivity and happiness of our entire team as well of our customers.
• Building our culture: Work we do today and the way we do it can make our future work better and faster. Since our product is tackling a complex problem, we’ll need to build a foundation that is flexible and allows us to adapt to a wide variety of blockchain protocols and product needs. By investing in our own productivity, we can get more done with less – we can work smarter.
• Growing the Team: Everyone on the early team plays an important role in attracting, closing, and growing other talented team members. The biggest factor in our ability to build amazing products is the team, so we look to you to help set the example for the kind of team we all want to build together.

Sounds like you?

• Comfortable working with the whole team, including the Engineering, Product and Business team, to identify customer pain points and craft a beautiful product that delights our users. Eager to contribute to our product roadmap, which is set collaboratively by Product and Engineering, by identifying valuable projects, communicating the strategy for them, and executing on them autonomously.
• A customer-first mindset and an interest in talking with customers to make sure we’re building a polished product that meets their needs. You can untangle hard conceptual problems and have sharp intuition for how people use (or wish they could use) products, with a passion about building for everyone because you understand the importance of accessibility.
• Strong judgment with the ability to ship opinionated products and to show the way on front-end best practices including but not limited to flexible and composable libraries and components, accessibility, performance and building maintainable code. History of building tooling to monitor and improve the quality, performance and accessibility of our products.
• You like to tell stories using both words and visual assets. Willingness to work with marketing to devise new ways to tell great stories to our potential and existing customers across our website, product, documentation and other channels.
• You care about the business needs, implications, and possibilities of your designs. You don't get stuck on pretty UI when iterating, and can balance between craft, speed and the bottom line. When we're set on a design, you have a strong attention to detail with pixel-perfect execution.
• Familiar with emerging trends in web application development, including the various approaches to styling (CSS Modules, CSS-in-JS, Sass, etc.), component libraries (Material UI, Carbon, Polaris, and Lightning), design tooling (Figma), and design system tooling (such as Storybook)
• Familiar with creating and maintaining simple design systems while avoiding premature optimization, and writing documentation for the team to use.
• Previous experience working closely with designers and product managers.
• Strong technical skills with HTML, CSS, Javascript, Typescript and NextJS / React.
• Experience writing documentation for the team to use.
• Experience designing, building, and deploying user-facing infrastructure related and/or API-based products is a plus.

Don't censor yourself: get in touch even if you're not matching 100% of these points.

What's it like to work at SkillZ?

The SkillZ backend is written mostly in Go,Javascript and Typescript. We have monorepos for both that host standalone services. Communication between services is done using HTTP Rest and our main database is PostgreSQL. Everything runs in EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) on AWS.

We've implemented a remote-first culture and organisation, so you can work from anywhere in Europe. We maintain core working hours of 9:30AM to 3PM UTC, when we're all online and available at the same time, then you manage your day however you want. We strive to be clear in our written communication.

We're early, so you'll have an opportunity to shape not just our product, but the company itself: who we work with, and how we work together.

Below are the values we share as a team, so if you like these, you'll enjoy working here. (And if you don't like them, please tell us what we're missing in our thinking!)

• We value high standards over quick wins. We want people to do their best work to build the decentralized future and be proud of it. We want to be impressed with the people we hire and have them show us how it's done. Reality has a surprising amount of details, and we rigorously care about these; good enough isn't good enough.
• We value reliable speed with a bias towards action over cost-savings. A culture of iterative shipping a reliable and secure product puts priorities into sharp focus and helps us efficiently use our constrained resources by limiting breakage and fixing. More importantly, we can act as a trusted partner for our clients who rely on us to support protocols and projects they believe in. We make sure we don't break what's critical and that we ship battle-tested features. We've only one shot at making a first impression, and it'd better be excellent.
• We value autonomy-enabling trust over micro-management. We share all aspects of our business with our team to empower them to make the right calls in their day-to-day and trust them to keep information within the circle. We want to know about problems (and wins) as fast as possible and solve them with a focus on raising our standards while avoiding personal blame. We believe that trust and transparency enable us to ship reliable products, building our reputation with our clients and partners.
• We value customer-centricity over industry recognition. Empathy with customers is a much better driver of our roadmap than competitors' features. We take a step back, put ourselves in the shoes of people we are serving, and think about making their lives better. We choose where we stand, find a difference, take a shot at solving their problem with a solution of our choosing and iterate until we succeed. Then, we do it again. We are in the business of making our customers happier (a never-ending task), not in the business of matching competitive offerings or making commentators happy. We strive to be empathetic internally as well, with a focus on people development with regular feedback.
• We value the optimistic learn-it-all over the know-it-all. The pace of technological improvement has never been faster while the general public has never been less excited about innovation and discovery. Ultimately we do what we do because Web 3.0 is the most creative space in the tech world and for the coming years. We also believe the world is incomplete and would be better with the possibilities offered by decentralized technologies. We want to share this journey with people who can take a step back and share our optimism and belief that technology is making the world better and bringing the future closer to us. We believe that like-minded people have a growth mindset and aim at learning anything and everything, continually developing and growing for the better, as part of a team of “The learn-it-all does better than the know-it-all".
• We care about our team. We know each other, what we like, what we hate and how we feel when facing hard situations. We respect each person's individuality and welcome people as they are.
• We share value with the communities we are part of. Yes, this means open-source. We build on open-source protocols, we see things that could do with a little tidying up or some larger improvements, we're not going to keep it for ourselves right? If we can remove roadblocks for other people, we are happy to share. Expect your work to be mostly closed-work and to be in a position to give back regularly.